Morning Win: The new Pro Bowl draft process is more exciting than the game (and still not that exciting)

The NFL has been trying to sell Sunday’s Pro Bowl as “fantasy football for real,” which would be totally accurate if the fans were the guy in your league who drafts his team and then forgets to set his lineup for the second half of the season.

The annual excursion of the league’s best players (or at least the ones not playing in the Super Bowl or suddenly afflicted with a mysterious injury) to Honolulu has been understandably besieged with apathy over the past years. After five plus months of grueling competition, it makes sense that most players wouldn’t be all that interested in putting in full effort in a meaningless game against the best players from the opposite conference.

It’s the only part of the Pro Bowl that’s going to be worth talking about.

With the team captains (the top two vote-getters on each side of the ball) already assigned (J.J. Watt and Jamaal Charles to Sanders, Drew Brees and Robert Quinn to Rice), defensive tackles, interior offensive linemen and special players went off the board Tuesday. That leaves 60 players for the prime positions on the board for Wednesday night’s (8 p.m. ET) live draft.

For as much as I’ve wanted to resist the new format, going to the NFL’s Pro Bowl roster pool site this morning does actually generate a little bit of the excitement that comes along each August before I select another chronically underachieving team in my long standing fantasy league. It’s certainly the league’s hope that plenty of people will end up spending part of the day killing time at their offices plotting how they’d build a team if they were in either Hall of Famer’s position. Our friends at The Huddle actually did this (before Drew Brees was revealed as a captain).

Would you build your offense around a playmaker like LeSean McCoy or grab Cam Newton? Does the deep pool of talented wideouts affect a drafting strategy? Is Patrick Peterson worth a top pick over a linebacker like Luke Kuechly given the wide open format of the game?

These are three more inquiries than anyone would have devoted towards the Pro Bowl in recent years, which ends up accomplishing the NFL’s goal. That curiosity still doesn’t make me want to devote three hours to seeing how it all pans out on Sunday. But it should make for a marginally more interesting product for those that do.

Northwestern basketball fans: A group of attendees at Tuesday’s game versus Purdue painted their chests to show solidarity with their fellow Big Ten school, which suffered a fatal on-campus shooting earlier in the day.

Morning Win: The new Pro Bowl draft process is more exciting than the game (and still not that exciting)

The NFL has been trying to sell Sunday’s Pro Bowl as “fantasy football for real,” which would be totally (…)

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